Ready for The Walking Dead on TV?

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From the set of the zombie series, a hint at what's to come...

By Eric Goldman

There will be a lot of new TV series debuting this fall, but the one that easily looks to be the most exciting has to be the only one with zombies in it - The Walking Dead. Based on the acclaimed comic book by Robert Kirkman, the AMC series has some formidable talent involved, including executive producer/writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and executive producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens, The Incredible Hulk).

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Atlanta set of The Walking Dead, as Darabont directed the first episode of the series. While we'll have plenty more material from that visit as the show approaches, we wanted to give you a hint at what's to come.

Darabont had been attempting to make a Walking Dead TV show for years, and told me he could recall going into a comic book store and first seeing Kirkman's comic. "I took it home and was really drawn into it and immediately thought, 'This is the way to do this subject as a television series,' because it was taking some fantastic chances and it was also so character driven and character rooted. That's what everybody got excited about."

British actor Andrew Lincoln (Love Actually) plays the main character, police officer Rick Grimes – who takes on a leadership role, as he and a small group of survivors attempt to find safety, amongst a zombie-filled America

Discussing his character, Lincoln told me, "What I've experienced from doing the scenes with him is that Rick is a very centered, serious, practical man. He's also a simple man. He's got a very good moral center; He's like a moral compass. And what happens is this eroding of his moral center. He wakes up to find the world has irrevocably changed. His motivational forces are obviously to find his family and discover what has happened to them. And what I've realized in playing him is that he is willing to go to any lengths. He's pushed into a corner and he's fighting his way out. "

Lincoln added, "I was chatting with Frank about this - that it's almost like when he starts killing the zombies, the walkers, it's almost like he's saying, 'Whatever's in front of me is not what I remember.' It's kind of like he's eradicating this [horror]. It's more of him trying to reclaim humanity through these kind of executions. And that's my justification of it: it's this man is willing to go to any lengths."

The first released production image of a zombie from the series -- which you can see below -- had a lot of the comics' fans impressed, as it makes it clear that the imagery on The Walking Dead will be very intense, to say the least. I was lucky enough to be on set when they were shooting the sequence with this zombie (and saw that specific photo taken!) and I can tell you, it was incredible to see this woman walking around an Atlanta park in the middle of the day looking so realistically undead. Making it all the more amusing and eerie were the sounds of children playing in a nearby local pool.

When it came to the horror content, Hurd said they'd gotten a ton of support from AMC – the home of Mad Men and Breaking Bad -- noting, "We're doing a zombie series; you cannot shy away from the fact that the zombies are undead. They're decomposing, and they want to kill and eat you. We've been given the all clear to go for it. Go big or go home."

The Zombie makeup on the series comes courtesy of Greg Nicotero, who has a ton of experience creating the undead on several projects, including many of George Romero's zombie films. "Because Frank and I have been talking about the show for a long time and we had great inspiration because the graphic novel has so many great visuals in it, we kind of knew what we wanted to do with it," Nicotero explained. "The zombies in the graphic novel have a very specific look. They all have dead eyes, a lot of them have exposed teeth, and there's a lot of damage. They are all really goth and all have stringy hair. So there's a specific Walking Dead look, and they're not just standard zombies."

This one's scary enough not walking - and trust us, most of the others are up on two feet

Said Lincoln of Nicotero's work, "Every day I go to work and it's artistry, what's being done. It's extraordinary, all of that area. It's funny, because we had two days with Jon Bernthal (who plays Rick's fellow cop, Shane) -- and this was pre-apocalypse-- and it was amazing because it felt like we were doing a cop show. And then suddenly I had that first day where I met my first zombie and I went, 'Oh... this is the show we're in!' And it was so exciting because of the quality and the detail and the care that had been lavished on that, on just the makeup and the details and the art."

Robert Kirkman is an executive producer on the series and is writing the fourth episode. Darabont said that when it came to turning the comic book into a TV series, "It is, very much so, a different rhythm. I like to say that the long-range goal is to follow Kirkman's path that he laid out, which is a tremendous template. That's the path of what we're doing, but we're going to take as many detours along the way as we can. And that means veering off the path at times, and it also means looping back around toward the main path. It gives us tremendous opportunity to really take the character through different arcs within the context of that established path. It gives us a great opportunity to really dig into it on a character level -- and also to do some cinematic stuff. Our pilot show ends right as Rick gets into Atlanta and that's actually not that many pages into the comic. That's an hour of what we're doing. We're giving it a lot of room to breathe is probably the most accurate way to say it. And Kirkland's all aboard with that idea."

"In fact, Robert's been very very encouraging and very sweet about it too," Darabont remarked. "He said from day one, 'Use what I've done as a jumping off point -- stick as closely or as loosely as you wish.' And that's a tremendous blessing -- from the creator of the material to give us that license to not be upset… in fact the more stuff I come up with or the writers come up with that expands upon what he's done, the happier he seems to be."

I asked Gale Anne Hurd what she thought the continuing popularity of zombies could be attributed to and she replied, "What's not to love about zombies? I think there is a fascination with the idea of if after you die you come back, but you're still decomposing at the same time. You're no longer bound by the rules of decorum and essentially all you want to do is eat people. It's a way of dealing with cannibalism and a lot of the taboos in an entertaining way."

She then paused and added, "And certainly with The Walking Dead, it's not really the zombies you have to fear, it's the humans."

If you're going to Comic-Con next week and want to learn more about The Walking Dead, then you're in luck! There will be a panel for the series on Friday, July 23rd at 11:30am in room 6BCF, featuring Frank Darabont, Gale Anne Hurd, Greg Nicotero and AMC's Joel Stillerman along with cast members Andrew Lincoln, Jon Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies ("Lori Grimes"), Laurie Holden ("Andrea") and Emma Bell ("Amy") – with none other than IGN's own Eric Moro moderating.

And if you can't make it to Comic-Con, no worries – IGN will have you covered, with continuing coverage from the convention about all the big reveals, including what we learn at The Walking Dead panel.